


Come fly with me: A space oddity in three acts

by maybeillride



Category: Free!
Genre: Alien Abduction, Haru would just like to be returned to the pool, Multi, Other, Rating May Change, please and thank you
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-30
Updated: 2017-05-30
Packaged: 2018-11-06 18:25:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11041761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybeillride/pseuds/maybeillride
Summary: Rin stands to talk to his hired muscle, or whoever the guy is. He’s so… effervescent, so enthusiastic as he gestures, part of Haru almost finds himself happy against his will. “Sousuke, can you believe it? What are the odds?? Four-point-two light years of nothing, then bam, right where I theorized it would be.”Human-Ape Sousuke scoffs. He still hasn’t moved, and his eyes don’t stray a millimeter from Haru. “You’re wrong so often, please forgive me if I don’t know how to react when you’re right.”





	Come fly with me: A space oddity in three acts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [brainindacloudz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brainindacloudz/gifts).



Haru pauses as he steps out of the locker room, the door wheezing gently shut behind him, staring across the peaceful expanse.

It’s a perfect night for a swim. It’s totally calm. The aspen trees surrounding the pool are so still they could be a matte painting from a bad ‘50s movie. The water is the same. It stretches before him in a sheet of aquamarine glass, glossy, solid yet weightless. _Perfect_.

It seems wrong to wreck such perfection. But he knows the water doesn’t mind, and he’s been waiting all day for this, using it to get up at dawn and drag himself on the train and sit through three meetings, each one dumber and more pointless. And on top of that there was some mechanical thing with his train home, something in the wiring, and he sat in a hot, sweaty limbo for a half hour as they tried to fix the AC and get it moving again. 

A kid a few rows down wailed inconsolably the whole time. Haru understood.

A few quick steps, a push off the concrete pool lip, and he’s finally free, savoring the moment of weightlessness at the top of his arc before falling into the water. It’s cold, shit is it ever cold – the rec center doesn’t heat it, and it’s barely June. It takes a few lengths before Haru can convince his lungs to let a full breath in. The cold feels good, though, erasing the day with every stroke he makes.

After a while Haru lets his body carry through the latest flip-turn but just coast out from the wall, like he’s a piece of driftwood floating on his own tide. His momentum carries him to the middle of the pool, the tops of the trees framing the bowl of the twilight sky. He searches for the faint dots of stars, making a game out of finding as many as he can while they’re vague suggestions. Between the intense focus of his search and his body’s total relaxation, he finds his eyes sliding closed.

…he’s in space, he half-imagines, half-dreams. He doesn’t need a spacesuit, or even oxygen. Somehow, he’s able to breathe in the vacuum, his body drifting up and down as naturally… as if he were in water. 

There’s a planet above him, rising overhead slowly, and he lazily watches. It’s hard to make out much about it, and he doesn’t want to wake himself up trying too hard. About all he can get is the light, this searing light and heat that he finds himself enjoying after the cold of the pool. He just floats in space, basks in the heat and feels his imaginary planet’s gravitational pull.

Its pull, that’s suddenly _pulling_ him, wrapping fingers around his ankles and wrists and arms and legs and through his hair and yanking a line right through his solar plexus. His eyes fly open –

He’s blinded by an actual light so bright he only wishes he could get a damn hand free to cover his face. But his hands are as trapped as he is, as the gravitational pull – the force field? – almost majestically lifts him out of the pool. He isn’t even sure what direction he’s traveling; the mystery light is so bright it’s totally disorienting. He could be hurtling into the sun for the many, many un-Christian things he’s done. 

Then, he’s crinkling through what feels like cellophane soaked in jelly, this… _squeeze_ , that’s squishy and oozing into him. It’s wet, but it’s also sharp (?), and his mind can’t swallow that _water isn’t supposed to be sharp_ and he’s so distracted that he doesn’t even realize he can’t breathe until his chest is tight and pounding. He forces his mouth open to swear, yell, scream, he doesn’t know –

And he’s free, the goo-field has vanished instantly like it was never there. “Fuck!!” his freed lungs holler like he’s a robot and someone just turned him off mute. 

A guy flinches back from where he’s crouching curiously over Haru, holding both hands up. 

“Hey, hey, hey! It’s okay! It’s okay!”

“Fuck!” Haru’s mouth decides to yell again. He was swimming. He was minding his own fucking business. He was finally getting some time to himself after a shitty Monday. And now he’s…

Where the fuck is he??

“Hey,” the guy tries, shifting (gingerly) over and bending low again, like Haru’s a stray cat. Haru ignores him and blinks suspiciously around.

The space he’s in is dark, and small, almost claustrophobic. There are winking lights off in the dimness and that’s about all he can make out. There’s a heavy, obnoxious smell – almost an odor – hanging in the air, and it takes him a second to place the memory. Ah. Art-school student-housing. Patchouli. _Really?_

He turns back to his asshole abductor.

“Hi,” the guy is saying, grinning at him widely. It’s a crazy grin that lights his handsome, angular face up like he and Haru are best buddies and he’s thrilled to see him again. Haru starts wondering if maybe this is a case of mistaken identity.

“Rin,” a gruff voice rumbles behind the guy and Haru finds he has to crane his neck. While Mr. Over-Friendly, “Rin,” could be a male model and is doing all he can to project how not-a-threat he is, the guy standing guard behind him doesn’t have an inch of give in his military-perfect posture. Arms folded like muscular origami, he stares down at Haru with an Easter Island-statue face, stone-motionless and utterly emotionless. He’s scary, there’s no doubt about it, but Haru isn’t scared.

He’s _pissed_ , dripping wet and cold and still sticky from the… rebirth or whatever it was he had to go through to end up here. His two captors clearly are holding all the cards, wearing some kind of tripped-out sci-fi outfits with broad shoulders and tall boots that look like Halloween costumes, but at least they’re warm. They’re armed, too, shiny snub-nosed guns holstered at their sides.

And that human ape stands there and acts like HE’S the threat.

Rin stands to talk to his hired muscle, or whoever the guy is. He’s so… effervescent, so enthusiastic as he gestures, part of Haru almost finds himself happy against his will. “Sousuke, can you believe it? What are the odds?? Four-point-two light years of nothing, then bam, right where I theorized it would be.”

Human-Ape Sousuke scoffs. He still hasn’t moved, and his eyes don’t stray a millimeter from Haru.

“You’re wrong so often, please forgive me if I don’t know how to react when you’re right.” Instead of smacking him like he clearly seems to deserve, Rin just comes back with a “good-one” guffaw and Haru blinks up at him.

“Well, get ready to start eating crow full-time, my friend. No one is gonna be able to deny my calculations when we come back with him.” He nods meaningfully towards where Haru sprawls on the floor, just in case he isn’t able to follow their conversation, presumably. 

The fact that Haru is in fact having no trouble understanding them is by no means the weirdest thing happening here. They’re speaking Japanese, informal and slang-y. They look Japanese, even if everything about their appearance is nudged just over the line into unreality. Their features are a little too perfect, their hair a little too artfully messy, their bodies… their bodies, porn-star pumped. It’s their coloring that keeps bothering Haru most. Sousuke’s eyes are so pale they’re almost colorless, like two laser beams. Rin’s a redhead, with mahogany eyes, which Haru has never encountered in all his life-drawing experience. 

The whole effect is a boy-band on some space-themed live-action anime shoot, and as soon as the thought slots into his mind Haru finds himself suddenly almost weak with relief. It’s such a logical explanation, he’s finally able to find his voice again.

“I maintain taking it was a mistake. You don’t marry your first date,” Sousuke is saying when Haru jumps up from the floor, eyes narrowed and arms crossed on his chest in some laughable show of force. 

Both guys jump back in alarm with their hands on their guns, and their reaction is so unexpected – and funny – Haru would laugh if he wasn’t already mid-rant.

“So where are the cameras?”

No camera crew or obnoxiously-dressed game-show host appears. There’s just an almost embarrassingly-long pause, the two space cowboys glancing slowly at each other then back at Haru. A few icy drips of water crawl down his back, and there’s a distant _ping!_ somewhere behind him that sounds like a microwave going off. Then Rin takes a tentative step closer, both hands up in that earnest peacemaking way. Sousuke stays put, standing tense with his hand on his weapon like they’re cops checking Haru out and he’s providing backup.

“No cameras here. It’s just me, you and Sousuke.” One corner of Rin’s mouth pulls up in a lopsided smile, and it’s charming, the kind of thing Haru’s drawn a hundred times when the character sheet calls for “sexy-yet-lovable bad-boy.” He smacks down his body’s non-consensual reaction.

“Bullshit. I do NOT agree to this… whatever this is. Reality show… thing.” He gives them the glare that never fails to chase off anyone unwanted. They gaze back at him, Rin’s charming grin wilting slightly, Sousuke doing that laser-beam thing with his eyes. “Plus, you really need to change the ‘alien abduction’ effect. You get someone with asthma, heart problems, you could kill ‘em. I doubt you want that kind of publicity.”

Rin opens his mouth but Sousuke’s faster, stepping up and resting a fatherly hand on Rin’s shoulder.

“Throw it back, Rin. This one’s nothing but trouble. You can tell just looking at it, much less listening to it.” He nods at his friend, and a spark twists in Haru’s stomach. “Come on. You want this to be perfect, don’t you?”

This time Rin’s the one who’s faster and Haru’s the one left with his mouth hanging open. “He IS perfect! He’s the one, Sousuke. Nothing can move in the water like him.” He angrily shrugs his friend’s hand off his shoulder, and when the bigger man reaches out again – in exasperation, it looks like – Rin not only knocks it away but gives him a shove. Sousuke shoves back, and they fall into a circle, fists up, practically snarling at each other. 

Rin’s landed a hard hit to Sousuke’s cheek when Haru finds himself diving right into the middle of their insanity, with no clue what he’s doing there. All he knows is that he has one palm on Rin’s chest and the other on Sousuke’s, Moses parting the beefcake sea, looking insistently between one then the other. They breathe hard against his hands, Rin’s cheeks cadmium red, Sousuke wide-eyed like a spooked horse, waiting for him to explain himself.

“Stop it,” he finally says. “I’m right here, if you’re gonna talk about me you might as well include me in the conversation.” 

“Rin,” Sousuke warns, and that twist spins in his stomach again. 

What? What’s the big bully so worried about? What can he do to fuck up their precious casting call? What’s wrong with talking to him?

Why does this guy seem to need to refer to him as “it”? What the fuck, really?

“I’ll do it,” Haru declares, glaring defiantly between them both. “Whatever ‘it’ is. This show, video shoot, whatever.” Rin beams, and Sousuke scowls, and he tries to tamp down the instant satisfaction both reactions provide him. “Just get me a towel. I’m freezing my nuts off here.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is dedicated to brainindacloudz, for her epic imagination that helped birth this crazy thing. So, if you enjoy the shenanigans to come, please know she's partly to blame ;D
> 
> Thank you for reading!


End file.
